A Marathon Oil subsidiary is burying carbon under Clymers, Indiana, for eighty-five dollars a ton.
Melissa Harrison is raising five grandchildren in one of a few dozen white-clapboard houses in Clymers, in Cass County, Indiana. Generations of her family are buried in the cemetery down the road. The school is closed. The Methodist church has been torn down. Two grocery stores, a Chevy dealer, and a diner used to be in town. What is there now is a fertilizer supplier that stores tanks around the playground, a hazardous waste recycler, and the Andersons ethanol plant — and a plan to pump carbon dioxide three thousand feet down into the geology under the houses, the cemetery, the wells, and the fields.
The Andersons, in a statement, called the project “a safe, established technology, with a rigorous permitting, engineering, and monitoring process to protect groundwater, public health, and the surrounding environment.” I do not argue with the engineering. I argue with the framing, which is the framing of every consolidated extractor in every industry I have watched hollow out a small town: the work we are doing is safe; the work we are doing is necessary; the work we are doing is the only version of the work that gets done. The work, in this case, is taking carbon that came out of a smokestack and pumping it under a town whose residents were asked, by letter, to accept a hundred and fifty dollars a year for the privilege.
The 45Q tax credit, written into the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, pays companies eighty-five dollars in transferable credits for every ton of point-source carbon they store underground. Ethanol plants emit a nearly pure stream of CO2, which is what makes their emissions simple to capture, and a string of ethanol plants across the Midwest are now lining up to take the credit. A modest project sequestering two hundred thousand metric tons a year pulls in seventeen million dollars a year from the credit alone. Larger projects plan to sequester tens of millions of tons. Kerwin Olson of the Indiana group Citizens Action Coalition said the obvious thing: “You can do the math. That is a lot of cash — an enormous amount of cash. You’re talking billions of dollars.”
What the credit subsidizes is not the absence of carbon in the air. It subsidizes the existence of the carbon in the first place. The carbon the Andersons plant emits is the carbon they are paid to bury. The 45Q credit is paid to a Marathon Oil subsidiary for emitting carbon, capturing the carbon they emitted, and burying the carbon they emitted in a hole under a town whose residents, under Indiana law, cannot in practice refuse. Charles Harvey, the MIT civil-and-environmental-engineering professor who helped start one of the world’s first carbon-sequestration companies in the early two-thousands and now opposes the technology he helped invent, said it plain: “It is loved by the industry because it’s a subsidy for whatever they’re already doing.”
I run a small-engine shop on forty acres my grandfather left my father, in Adams County in the central sand counties of Wisconsin. The Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative is headquartered a mile and a half down the road. I have read the cooperative’s annual reports. I have read the Wisconsin DNR data series on well-water nitrate. I have read the Adams County Land and Water Conservation Department reports. I do not have a carbon-sequestration project under my shop and I do not expect one. The geology is wrong. The corporate-extraction pattern is the same.
If you want to see what that pattern looks like when it lands in a county, you do not have to look far. Up here in Adams County we have spent years watching the nitrates creep into the shallow wells on the south side of the county from the CAFO lagoons, watching the center-pivot irrigation permits get stamped while the water table drops, watching the corn fields that used to bear the names of the families who worked them pass into three corporations’ names. The industry changes. The extractive mind stays exactly the same.
I fix engines and machines for a living. I know what happens to a pressurized pipe when the ground shifts, when the metal fatigues, when a seal gives out. The companies holding the town meetings down in Indiana and across the Midwest stand in front of the locals and tell them the storage is perfectly safe, that the rock will hold it, that it cannot leak. The industry analysts will tell you the recent setbacks scared them straight, that they are overbuilding these wells now to prevent another disaster. But overbuilding is what they said about the Satartia pipe. Overbuilding is what they said before the Illinois leaks. A seal does not care how carefully you installed it once the geology shifts.
The risks are not hypothetical. In 2020, a carbon-dioxide pipeline ruptured in rural Mississippi, putting forty-five people in the hospital and evacuating two hundred. The emergency director of the affected county told NPR it looked like the zombie apocalypse. In 2024, the nation’s first commercial carbon-storage project — under a lake that provides drinking water for large parts of central Illinois — developed two leaks. The state of Illinois subsequently banned new carbon-storage projects under one of its biggest aquifers. A pipe is a pipe. A well is a well. They break.
This is the nationalist shell game playing out on the county line. The companies talk about American energy, about domestic supply chains, about securing the future. But the future they are securing is the quarterly dividend of a multinational oil subsidiary. The folks in Clymers organized to fight the Andersons plant and found out that the state law essentially strips them of the right to say no to the pipeline easements. They were offered a hundred and fifty dollars a year to let a corporation pump compressed gas under their family cemeteries. If you refuse, the state will route it through anyway. We saw the same playbook at work when a thermal energy storage project debuted beside a South Dakota ethanol plant and a large energy storage plant launched in South Dakota as the thermal system started up — the infrastructure gets denser, the permits get rubber-stamped, and the people who actually live in the shadow of the tanks are told that progress requires their silence.
The carbon-capture operators employ the underground-injection technology they refined for fracking. They have spent thirty years funding the manufactured doubt Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented in Merchants of Doubt. The Biden administration wrote the credit into the Inflation Reduction Act. The Trump administration has called the climate crisis a hoax and continued the credit. The subsidy does not change the carbon in the air. The subsidy changes who is paid for the carbon that was going to be emitted anyway.
Underneath that is a smaller, uglier story, the one the small operator knows from the inside. Dennis Crume, the farmer who refused to sign the form offering him a hundred and fifty dollars an acre, grows soybeans and corn and a few cows and tries to grow most of what his family eats. He has eleven grandchildren living nearby. Indiana law essentially strips individual landowners of the right to reject the proposal. Crume can refuse to sign. Crume cannot refuse to live above the carbon. The small operator is rhetorically sovereign and substantively subordinate. That is what it looks like when the man who grows the food is asked to subsidize, with his own land and his own grandchildren’s water, the company that pollutes the air above it.
Wendell Berry, in The Unsettling of America, has been writing about that pattern for fifty years — the consolidated operator who arrives not in a community but in a location, treating the community as incidental, the operation as the point. The 45Q credit is the consolidated operator’s view of climate policy. It puts the cost of a climate intervention on the small place that has no bargaining power, and it puts the benefit on the consolidated operator that has the statehouse, the credit, the seismic analysis, and the test well. Berry spent his career warning us about the extractive mind, the mentality that looks at a piece of ground and sees only what can be taken from it or dumped into it. Carbon capture, the way it is structured today, is the ultimate expression of that mindset. It is a technology designed not to end the fossil fuel economy, but to extend it, to give the ethanol conglomerates and the oil majors a new revenue stream while they keep the pumps running. It is a subsidy for whatever they are already doing. The real climate work, the work that actually protects the membership of a place, requires cutting the emissions at the source. It requires retiring the plants that are poisoning the groundwater, not paying them to bury the exhaust.
The notebook I keep at the bench records twelve years of climate data at the south end of my property and on Lake Petenwell — the lake ice-out, the rut, the syrup season, the deer bedding, the wells. The notebook does not record whether an eighty-five-dollar-a-ton credit-paid carbon-storage project will prevent global heating. The notebook records that the climate is changing and that the question of which interventions actually cut emissions is the question the people who live above the carbon deserve a real answer to.
A real climate policy for rural America would not bury the carbon. It would not emit it in the first place. It would price the carbon at the smokestack, restore the 45Q credit to its original 2008 form, and route the actual buildout of renewable generation to member-owned electric cooperatives the way the 1936 Rural Electrification Act did for electricity.
Marathon Oil is what Steve Coll called a private empire. The 45Q credit is a public subsidy for that private empire. Clymers is a public town. The carbon goes under the public town. The credit goes to the private empire. The grandchildren of Clymers will, if the project goes forward, grow up above the carbon the way the grandchildren of Adams County grow up above the nitrate, and the way the grandchildren of Kewaunee County grew up drinking from wells that the corporate-ag operations fouled. The wires on the poles were meant to bring us power. The pipes under the frost line are meant to bring them a tax credit. The people who design this machinery will fly home to suburbs built on higher ground when the valves finally fail. We are the ones who will be left to boil the water, if the water still runs.
I do not write the columns I write because I think the small town is going to win. I write them because the small town is the place the carbon is being put, and somebody has to write that down.